Year: 2009

Data Mining 2009 Interviews- Terry Whitlock, BlueCross BlueShield of TN

Terry Whitlock, Health Care Expert

Terry Whitlock is an employee of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. He has more than 15 years of analytical experience in managed care. He has utilized SAS for nearly 13 of his 15 years over a wide variety of research in the field of managed care. Over his career he has been published in Managed Care Interface and presented research at Best of Blues as well as Academy Health Research

simply download the Interview file at https://decisionstats.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/20091027-112844.m4a

Digitization to help education: Blackboard

At University of Tennessee, we use a digital solution called BlackBoard. This helps streamline communiction as well as enables us to cut down down on paper usage, besides capturing a lot of data for analysis and course improvement.

Basically it helps capture data for the following-

1) How often and ehen precisely did instructors announce change in syllabus, announcements, homework

2) Grades are posted online and students can see their grade with average and s.d of whole class ( FERPA – A federal law restricts making comparisons between students or telling them another person grades)

3) Lectures are recorded by Video ( and can be seen but not downloaded). Thus good lectures and courses can possibly be offered as digital courses or donated to suitable causes.

4) Instructors can see from analytics ( web) when and how often students referred to the course specific site. This helps them in understanding needs for students who may be lagging behind.

5) It has the facillity for polls to give constant feedback to instuctor during the course.

6) All slides and course material is shared securely without being accessible to outside web thus ensuring intellectual property protection for the course contents ( a policy I disagree with mildly- and sites like StudyBlue now offer students incentives to post the same content back for sharing)

7) Much better version control than lots of email floating with attachments or lots of printouts of slides per lecture. Digitization saves costs AND is good for student.

Eg A high school in Harlem or say in rural East Tennessee lacks good maths teachers. Using Digitization, Online Video and inexpensive solutions- students in far off schools can possibly share video lectures from the best private maths tutors ( at exclusive California or Dc schools). Technology can thus help bridge the technical instructor divide without  rampant labour cost destroying offshoring- and it is heartening to see some companies like SAS Education go for On Demand educational solutions ( though more SAS focussed and not basic maths or stats focussed) Even SAP has a great University partnering program.

bb

The Best of Times: A Disruptive Innovation

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Ever felt bad for a website like Yahoo.com or Nytimes.com whom you really liked using but dont know what to do to help it.

Click the ads. Like Fans of a Baseball team clap more, fans of a website should click more ( this site does not use Cost Per Click as I feel Cost per Conversion is a more HONEST statistical measure so try this at somewhere)

Surely the fans of a website like NYTimes.com deserve some say – just as much the Private Equity Funds and Wall Street Honchos and internal investors.

and while you are doing it- confuse Google. AND Bing.

Together.

This is the reverse of the adblock plugin-

click all the ads that you can see .Twice.

 

 

Not so AWkward after all: R GUI RKWard

I saw two packages bundled with Ubuntu ( one was R Cmdr) which I have talked about before ( for some reason Rattle continues to give some problem with Ubuntu)

The other R GUI is RKWard.

This one is clearly inspired by SPSS GUI design and though not so nifty and lite as R Cmdr can be used for higher end stuff

The website is here-

http://rkward.sourceforge.net/

Some screenshots created by me- I swear I only used the mouse while doing this- no keyboard hence a true GUI.

RKward2RKWard

RkWard3

  • New features / improvements in latest version

– Add Stata data file import plugin (by Michael Ash) –

For much better screenshots see-

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Screenshots

Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It still could do with more community testing and support and some of the Desktop performance was not that great ( code generated was clunky and reminded me of other GUIs that sit too heavy on command line unlike RCmdr)

Truly impressive is the multiple flexibility offered in details ( like for Plots or for Graphical Analysis)-

and with the help of a Citrix Server on the INTERNET, can POTENTIALLY be offered on Amazon EC2 environment for as low as 2.5 $ per hour for heavy data processing AND stats analysis (with no hardware OR software legacy costs)

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R , Ubuntu, RCmdr Updates

Some nice updates for R followers-

1) Rather than have an Icon for R – There is a seperate icon for RCmdr in Ubuntu Karmic Koala – Thus the default screen on opening is R Cmdr.

2) REvolution Computing has managed a coup with their bundling of their libraries with the R Distribution in Ubuntu Karmic Koala( see screenshot). We however still are waiting for who gets the credit for that ( Daneese Cooper or the long suffering Mr Smith)

Screenshot

 

3)Karmic Koala offers 2 GB free space  for storing data in the cloud for every user and 50 GB at 10$ a month. This helps with your storage costs. Data is protected thanks to an oauth login id and machine specific tie-in.

4) RCmdr has a great new plugin for DOE (Design off Experiments) students. DOE is a powerful and under utilized technique especially in Web Analytics. This is promising given that Dr John Fox ( whom we interviewed on this website) has going on ahead and seems clearly to have established RCmdr as the introductory GUI for beginners to R.

(see screenshot 2 below)

5) The Karmic Koala is very easy to install and very intuitive to use- Don’t want to give up your Windows ( well just install a dual boot which takes less than 1 hour on a fast internet connection or 15 minutes if you have a DVD)

 

Screenshot-1

6) What are other Statistics softwares doing? If they are not too keen on helping Microsoft get more sales ( especially student OS licenses) why don’t they offer the Ubuntu version free for students ( and besides once and for all put to rest the open source credential controversy)